November 11, 2006
An Interview with Claire Messud, Part I
With her third novel, The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud did something every writer dreams about: received positive critical notice, and hit the bestseller list. Still, one can’t have everything; when […]
November 5, 2006
A Conversation with Marisha Pessl, Part II
As promised, the second part of my conversation with Marisha Pessl (the first part is here). After talking a bit about her book, Marisha walks me through the process of […]
November 4, 2006
A Conversation with Marisha Pessl, Part I
I met Marisha Pessl last month at 192 Books, where she read from her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Because she was so gracious in fielding the questions […]
October 20, 2006
Tell the New York Times What’s What
Did you disagree with the selection of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the greatest novel in the last 25 years? Were you wondering why your pet was ignored in the lineup? […]
October 13, 2006
Ghosts of Ginsberg
A few nights ago I had the opportunity to see a rare performance: the often overlooked (or at least less famous than some of her male colleagues) Beat poet Anne […]
October 3, 2006
C??zanne
Reading James Wood on C??zanne (via Maud Newton), I felt very much like a dog eagerly awaiting a treat from the dinnertable and getting none. Merleau-Ponty has written quite eloquently […]
September 26, 2006
The Benefits of Riding the Subway
Every morning, I come into Manhattan from Brooklyn on the R. And one of those lovely side benefits of moving to the city that no one told me about is […]
September 14, 2006
Bookermania
Now that the Booker Prize shortlist is out, one of my year’s rituals can begin. Unfortunately, only one of the books I already own, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, […]
September 14, 2006
More on The Sound and the Fury
In my last entry I suggested that tragedy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury consists in entrapment in an interpretive framework, mediated by language, that fails to make sense […]
September 12, 2006
If This James Frey Thing Goes Through…
A non-exhaustive list of books I would like my money back on (in no particular order): A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers – The book that made […]
September 1, 2006
Too Bad The New Yorker Doesn’t Have a Zero-Tolerance Policy for Sloppy Logic
In this New Yorker tidbit, Malcolm Gladwell makes a number of mistakes–since he’s talking about education, let me recommend to him a rudimentary logic class. Once he’s taken it, he […]
August 24, 2006
Unpacking my library: on book-moving and Benjamin
Last night, in the midst of moving books all over my house, I took the opportunity to revisit Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” […]